6:30 a.m. I awake to my alarm buzzing and Husband not in bed next to me. I hit snooze until Husband opens the bedroom door and tells me to get up before I’m late taking Little, our 4-year-old son, to his special-needs program where he gets all histherapies.

7:15 a.m. I watch Husband as he tries to get in a few minutes of quality time with Little. Husband picks Little up, throws him, and catches him. Husband doesn’t seem to notice the way Little’s hands clench in spasm, the way he walks with his leg braces the way I imagine a scissor would walk, thanks to his cerebral palsy. I both adore how Husband treats Little like a typical child, and resent that, as the one in charge of coordinating his therapies, I don’t always have thatluxury.

9:30 p.m. Husband comes home late after working overtime again (he’s in advertising). I’ve been researching stuff online and barely look at him when he walks through the door because I’m immersed in anarticle.

9:35 p.m. He physically lifts me away from the computer and slaps my butt over my jeans. I say hello properly, and he smiles and kisses me. He tells me he loves me and doesn’t want to be ignored when he comes home. Husband takes me by the hand and leads me to thebedroom.

9:38 p.m. He pulls my jeans down and bends me over the bed. I’m still wearing my shirt and shoes. He begins to spank me, panties down, but I recognize by the lightness of the swats that he’s just playing and trying to get me turned on. It kinda works, and it takes my mind off of things long enough for him to be able to push himself inside me while we’re fully clothed. I worry about getting sex juice on the comforter. It feels good, but I can’t focus. I don’tcome.

10 p.m. “All right, fine. What did you want to show me on the computer?” he asks when wefinish.

DAYTWO

8:30 a.m. I come home from dropping Little off at school. Husband’s in the kitchen, injecting something into the upper part of his muscular butt. I know this is why he has the sex drive of a horny teenager at the age of 36. Despite my fears about steroids, Husband has zero acne and his balls never shrunk, thanks to the estrogen-boosting drugs the doctor gave him in addition to the testosterone. He looks better than any of my friends’ husbands, filling out his T-shirt so his biceps strain against the material. “I love your shoulders,” I say. He drops the needle into an old protein-powder container and grins. “Thanks, babe. And you’re totally hot.” I laugh but I know he means it, and I feel sexy. He leaves forwork.

9 a.m. Husband leaves for his job and says,“I love you,” as he walks out the door. We both make sure it’s always the very last thing we say to each other before either of us leaves the house, or hangs up the phone. That means if he says “I love you” and then has to come back in and grab the keys, he’ll say it again. We never made a plan to do this, it just happened. Since I do the same thing with both my parents and with Little, and Husband does the same with his parents, I wonder if it’s something that Jewish mothers habitually instill in theirchildren.

11 p.m. Husband goes to bed before me after we watch Alex Jones’s alternative news show on YouTube. I’m all riled up again and can’t sleep so I stay on the couch, watching a year-old video of Adam Kokesh getting brutalized by cops for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. I think that Kokesh is really hot, with that shaved head and all those muscles, just like Husband. I love how he resists authority peacefully. I hate how they beat him and choke him, even though he doesn’t fight back. But I watch the video three times in arow.

DAYTHREE

6:45 a.m. Husband is awake and out of bed before me. I don’t know if he slept on the couch ornot.

8 p.m. I dress up for “girls’ night out,” glad to be out of my usual outfit of jeans and a shirt. Husband pins my arms to the wall as he kisses me and tells me I look hot. He lets go of my arms and we wrap each other in an embrace against the wall, making out, hidden by the layout of our house. Little is late to bed and sees us, toddling over to us in his funny gait, his left hand held up in a claw position next to his ear as if for balance. He hugs our legs and looks up, grinning. The sexy make-out session becomes a family grouphug.

9:30 p.m. All the girls have had a few drinks except for me and are trash-talking their husbands. I have nothing bad to say about mine, but if they knew he spanked me they’d think he was some sort of abuser, even if I told them I enjoyed the dynamic. They’re totallyvanilla.

Midnight I come home. Husband is on the couch, watching Sons of Anarchy. I straddle his lap and we neck on the couch like teenagers. I want to mount him, but the windows have sheer curtains, so we go into the bedroom and do it there, me ontop.

DAYFOUR

5 a.m. Husband wakes me up accidentally and now I’m up, too. He never attempts morning sex anymore, after almost ten years of me turning him down. I’m not a morning person, so he jacks off in theshower.

5:30 p.m. Husband, Little, and I eat at McDonald’s. We don’t keep kosher the way we did when we first got married. Husband eats so much food I get a little ill watching him, but since he works out at the gym every day during lunch and is on steroids, his metabolism absorbs it. I’d still love him if he gained a bunch of weight, of course. But knowing him, he’ll be using TRT (testosterone replacement therapy, i.e., steroids) forever. I imagine after ten years of marriage and a child together, having him gain weight if he had to stop working out wouldn’t be the end of the world. God knows I gained a bunch when I was pregnant. Took a year to lose it, too. And yet he still told me I was hot every single day. Such akeeper!

7 p.m. I light the Shabbat candles late, but since we don’t actually keep the Sabbath I’m not too concerned. We’reJewish-lite.

8:45 p.m. With Little in bed, Husband and I have time to ourselves, but he says he’s still too full for sex. We watch the mainstream news and debate everything being told tous.

9 p.m. I tell Husband about the lithium pipeline in Afghanistan worth a trillion dollars, lithium that America wants for computers and batteries. He agrees that the mineral resources and the oil in the Middle East are the reason the American government is overstaying its welcome. Husband thinks terrorists are still a threat, in part at least. The debate continues when I say the only threat to our safety is our own government. At this point I’m too pissed off at the news to have sexanyway.

11 p.m. We go to bed and say a prayer for the troops, that they can come home and put an end to this blood for oil war. Then we tell each other “I love you,” and go to sleep, our backs pressed against each other forcomfort.

DAYFIVE

10 a.m. I start my period, and on the weekend too. I curse my bad luck and regret not having sex with Husband last night when I could. We semi-follow the laws of Taharat Ha’Mishpacha, Family Purity. Once I get my period I’m “niddah” (unclean, not that I think of myself as unclean) and we can’t have sex until after I stop spotting. I tell Husband the bad news. The good news is that by the time we can have sex, it’s always like our honeymoon all over again. Technically, there’s no touching at all allowed during this time, although we always cheat and continue non-sexual touching, mainly because I can’t keep my hands off of him and vice versa. The few times in our marriage when we had sex during my period, I ended up getting a urinary tract infection right after. That sealed the deal for us. Even though we were both raised Jewish, neither of us knew about Family Purity until right before we gotmarried.

12:30 p.m. Husband takes Little to the playground and I’m grateful to have an hour of privacy. I use my vibrator on the outside of my panties, thinking about the last time my husband used the vibrator on me and gave me so many orgasms I lost count. This time I have two in a row and take anap.

2 p.m. Little and Husband are home. Husband watches as I make the bed again, knowing he’s not supposed to watch me make the bed because it might incite us to have sex when I’m niddah. I laugh at him. “Mommy’s hot,” he tells Little. “Firestar hot,” Little says. That’s Spiderman’s female sidekick. I raise my eyebrows at Husband, knowing he taught the kid to saythat.

Midnight Husband and I sleep facing away from each other to avoid temptation. I’m not in the mood anyway. At some point in the night, he moves to thecouch.

DAYSIX

1:30 p.m. Little is napping and will be for the next two to three hours. Husband kisses my neck as I fold the laundry and fondles my breasts. I push his hand away, and PMS makes me not so gentle about it. “Don’t start what you can’t finish,” I say. Husband groans and excuses himself to the bathroom to jackoff.

3 p.m. Husband’s dad watches Little, so Husband and I can go do target practice. I shoot the paper target right in the head on the first shotand follow it up with a tight grouping of more head shots. “That’s some clean shooting,” the gun range owner says when we check out and he sees my target. Husband looks very proud of me, and even though I hate the loud pop pop pop of the gun range, I love that look on his face. It’s a gooddate.

DAYSEVEN

7:30 a.m. Husband comes in and wakes me up, but I’ve already hit snooze so many times that Little and I will be late forschool.

3 p.m. Little is napping, so I take a nap too. I can’t fall asleep even though I’m tired, so I give myself a quick orgasm with the vibrator again. Masturbation gives me a different type of orgasm than when Husband makes me come. It’s faster by myself, and a bit more relaxing since I know I can just fall asleep right after instead of it being a prelude to a longer sexualexperience.

9:30 p.m. Husband asks if I’m still spotting, and I am, so he doesn’t bother even kissing me. He tells me he loves me and goes to bed early, and I stay up researching things online until I’m so upset I can’t sleep atall.

2 a.m. Still awake. Stillworrying.

TOTALS: Two acts of intercourse; two masturbation sessions; one spanking; two make-out sessions; one illicit fondle; several attempts at practicing ourreligion.

The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO today — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico.

All the active-duty troops that President Donald Trump ordered sent to the border before the midterm elections should be home by Christmas, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is running the mission from San Antonio, Texas.

A shooting at a Chicago hospital has wounded multiple people, including a suspect and a police officer, authorities said.

Shots were fired Monday afternoon at Mercy Hospital on the city’s South Side, and officers were searching the facility. Police issued a statement on Twitter saying there were “reports of multiple victims.”

A witness named James Gray told Chicago television station ABC 7 that he saw multiple people shot: “It looked like he was turning and shooting people at random.”

From @presssec: new rules for reporters at WH press conferences.- one question per reporter, then yield floor and microphone.- followup question “may be permitted.” Then yield floor and microphone.- “failure to abide” may result in suspension/revocation” of WH press pass.

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI